Mr. Hillier, founder and
president of
TheSienctificWorld.com service, reflected on my review of sciBASE, a
component of his service, in a letter to the editor (Online
January/February, 2002). Beyond lamenting that I obscured the significant
benefits of the Personal User Profile (PuP), he made numerous factual
"corrections". I am glad that the pervasive cutesy pup
logo which appeared on every screen was removed. It was more appropriate for
a K-6 site than for a scientific one. But I am not happy with his "corrections".

Although
much of the long letter is PR-poop
which should have been placed as an ad, I chose to reply. After all, Mr.
Hillier, with his background at Elsevier and CRC, is an
industry veteran, and he deserves attention, and a reply, especially because
he is the one who dispenses inaccurate information. It would be a
disservice to readers of Online to be left misinformed about the facts.
Opinions are other matters.

As
excerpts from scanned images of my original printouts, and screen
shots illustrate, Mr. Hillier "corrects" right data with wrong
data, time and again.

For a starter, it is not
possible to comment on recent
enhancements which were implemented recently, after I
submitted the review in June, 2001.

Second, I
did not create the table that Mr. Hillier keeps referring to when claiming
inaccuracies. It is part of a sidebar made by my editor, Marydee Ojala.

Although most -if not
all- of the factual "errors" that Mr. Hillier refers to appear
in the table, the poop
was left at my door. Marydee has been catching and correcting errors which
I made in the past, so I am happy to respond for the criticism of the
table It is a gratifying task as she was -not surprisingly-
right.

This is
a part the table in the sidebar of Marydee. Notice the journals where she reported that the copyright fee
in sciBASE is $0.00. Also notice the astronomical copyright fee
for one journal.

The table reported what was found (and
still can be found as of February, 2002) in sciBASE about the copyright
for the British Medical Journal. It is sciBASE which suggests that
it does not charge a fee. (Indeed, at the superb BMJ.com
site there is no fee at all for the full text of the nearly 30,000
articles).

True, there are records where the $4.88
copyright fee is shown by sciBASE, but there are many more records
for articles from the British Medical Journal that displays the $0.00
copyright fee which Mr. Hillier labeled as incorrect in the table. So who
is incorrect? And why the large discrepancy in tens of thousands of
records for this journal alone?. You know the answer for the first, and
you will learn for the second a little
later.

The
president conveniently does not use quotation signs in this correction. No
wonder, because I
wrote that "the copyright fee listed for several Academic
Press journal titles is zero, which is equally hard to
believe".

I knew that copyright fee should apply.
I am familiar with AP's policy and the subject. As for rare
restrictions and clearly stated statements, read on.

But first, check the
truth about the statement that "The fee for Information and
Computation is $35.67".

Wait a minute, Information and
Computation is an Academic Press journal.

Did not Mr. Hillier just
assert that
Academic Press does not allow delivering documents electronically? He
did.

Who
said that Information and Computation's copyright fee is $35.67? He did.

So,
who was inaccurate, again?

Wouldn't
it be better to use straight language right in the
bibliographic citation instead of bamboozling users with this
nonsense $0.00 article fee and $0.00 copyright fee? It even confused
the man who presides over the service.

It
is nice that for this article
sciBASE can offer an abstract. It is not that nice that it charges
$2.50 for it. You can get it from PASCAL on DialogSelect (which does not charge for
searching) for $1.55-$1.95 .

.But
you can have an even better deal.
As you see below, the publisher
also has an abstract for you - for free. Actually, it has free abstracts
for 670 of the 690 articles from this journal alone.

Academic
Press has similarly informative free abstracts for nearly 180,000 of
the 201,000+ articles from all of its journals for the past 10 years, and a very intuitive
and powerful software with further links.

Is
the abstract in the PASCAL database better? No, it is exactly the same
with less options, it was lifted from the article "as is"
into the PASCAL database, no muss, no fuss.

Mr. Hillier just can't stop looking for
other "errors". Not finding any, he makes up one, by claiming
that the table has once again incorrect information. Or does it?.

Well, one more example by the president, and one more mistake. Neither the article, nor the table
(shown earlier) claimed that this journal's copyright fee is
$28.50.

As you could see from the excerpt earlier, the table indicated that the price is $0.00 - and that's
exactly what
sciBASE still reports (Apparently, the Journal of Physics is published by one of
many other not really "rare" publishers who do not allow for
sciBASE electronic document supply. Who did you say was inaccurate,
again?.

You
would believe that the president of the service has enough clout to have
the record support what he asserts in writing as a fact, or has enough
human and other resources to get his facts checked when criticizing a
reviewer for incorrect information.

As for the $0.00 prices and "clearly stating the
restriction" (and observing it, I assume), I would counsel more
caution to Mr. Hillier, too.

There
is a very large number of duplicates in sciBASE, with slightly different bibliographic citations culled from
different sources - without duplicate checking or elimination. It gets
really confusing.

The
records show very different
price information for the very same article. (Medline is consistent
in the journal name format, but PASCAL is notorious about the
inconsistency.)

The records with $0.00 fees indeed
show a pop-up message (although without explanation about the
restriction) when you want to add it to the shopping cart.

What about the
twin record for the same article that charges $12 + $4.88 for the very same article? Scroll
down to see.

It
does get into your shopping cart without any pop-up
message or warning. After all, Mr. Hillier said that the copyright fee of
BMJ is
$4.88. Is he accurate?

Well,
in this matter sometimes he is, more often he is not. About 27,500
records claim $4.88 copyright fee, but more than 34,000 reports $0.00.

No,
the difference is not because of the different editions of BMJ (clinical,
international, etc). There are tens of thousands duplicates with different
price tag for the very same article from the very same journal.

Of course you can avoid this mess if you head for the
straightforward and free PubMed service, which offers free abstracts for
most of the records, and guides you to free versions of the articles, if
there are ones in PubMed Central (PMC), or at the publisher's site.

For example, on the home page of BMJ, you can search
the full text of all the documents published in BMJ since 1994. You can have
the output in PDF and/or HTML format, with links to related articles,
cited articles, citing articles, and a lot of other very cerebral
functions for free.

There are many other publisher sites
with intelligent options to which PubMed links you to for the free
article. There are literally millions of free abstracts and full text articles at publishers' web sites,
in PubMed
Central, and at the sites of digital facilitators (HighWire
Press, Ingenta/
CatchWord) for which sciBASE charges you article fees and copyright
fees in a very confusing way, changing the copyright fees
almost as often as they change guards at Arlington.

Since
my original review the copyright fee of all journals which I tested
(except one) increased - at least at sciBASE.

I am glad that at least one of the things
that I criticized (beyond he excessive use of the PuP logo) was changed. I
wrote about the absurdity of the copyright fee for the Journal of Law and
Education which was listed as $96.86. Mr. Hillier wrote in his response
that it "was the fee quoted by the Copyright Licensing Agency to the
British Library".